So, the first project I've been put to work on since starting at Headshift six weeks ago was the site for Anthony Gormley's One and Other project - a pretty massive undertaking that aims to put 2400 people on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square for an hour each other the summer.

Apart from being well and truly thrown in at the deep end with an ambitious, high-profile project (after two years at an early-stage startup i'd pretty much forgotten what deadlines look like), it's been a really interesting experience working on a big social software project for an art-world client.

The key thing about this, to my mind at least, is that fine art pretty much is a social medium itself. The barriers to entry are very low, and while the economics of galleries and collectors do tend to favor a privileged few, it's certainly infinitely more participatory than the huge monolithic economies of the mass-media and popular culture.

In fact, I think that as people working in the online and new-media space, there's a lot that we can learn from the art-world, as a lot of the ideas and principles that are central to this new world of many-to-many, communicative culture, have actually been fairly well trodden by art critics and theorists for many many years. For instance, Lawrence Lessig's ideas about a free, participatory culture, while they are unquestionably revolutionary in legal and economic terms, actually reflect concerns that cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes were talking about since the first half of the twentieth century.

I'm not suggesting that there's nothing revolutionary or innovative about social media or the people working with it at all - I'm a firm believer in the value and importance of all the opportunities for communication, creativity and community-building that these technologies create. However, I think it's often easy to neglect the debt that we owe to people in other fields who've contributed to all the cool things we're working on.

Perhaps the reason these connections are often overlooked is one of language; where we talk about 'remixing' the art-world says 'appropriation', when we refer to 'mash-ups' they're discussing 'bricolage'. It's a great shame that more is not made of these common areas of interest, as some sort of dialogue would undoubtedly be of great benefit to both parties. For instance, the Free Culture movement that evolved around Lessig's writing (and the principles and personalities of the Free Software movement) so often seems to assume that the primary driving force behind artistic endeavour is the pursuit of fame or authority - an assumption that seems more rooted in the business models of the big pop-culture factories than in fine art criticism or practice. In the same way, the world of fine art has been known to be dismissive of work that is informed by or makes use of new technology, often due to the investment concerns of collectors who favour tangible work that more readily accrue monetary value.

However, the fact remains that we're essentially talking about the same concepts, which is why I think that any projects or discussion that span both disciplines are fundamentally important to our understanding of the development of new media for art and communication and the new economies that will grow around them.

One and Other, in my opinion, is a great example of one of these types of project. Conceived as a 'living portrait of the UK', and explicitly positioned by artist Anthony Gormley as "a work about the democratisation of art", One and Other is an inherently social (or relational, as the notional art-world people we met above might say) work, which espouses all the principles of participation and sociality that concern the business of social media.

Therefore, it seems fairly natural that a work with such inherently social ambitions should benefit hugely from an explicitly social strategy for its internet presence, a principle that has informed our work on the project so far. In addition, use of social media within the artworld seems to be a concern which is generating more interest - The Cornerhouse Gallery in Manchester recently commissioned an essay on the subject, and is soliciting discussion around some of related issues on its site. Ultimately I'm fairly confident that this sort of discussion will lead to greatly enriched discussion of some of these issues within the art and social media worlds, as well as increased dialogue between the two, and hopefully a great many more interesting projects that work in the intersection between art and social technology.